Haltherrion
First Post
When I last ran a conquest/leadership campaign, the King PC was indeed at the head of his army. But that involved a bunch of regular adventurey type encounters, albeit set against a backdrop of tens of thousands. The actual 'encounters' focused on the King and his immediate vicinity as he eg stormed the walls of the enemy Citadel of Jrebb, slew an enemy monster (Grey Render), fought through the Citadel, took on the enemy leader Evil High Priest Cavarnhissern in his lair, and rescued the princess - his future bride - and the other young royal hostages of what would soon be his client kingdoms.
That's certainly a way to handle it and sounds like it worked fine.
How did it work in your game group having one person be the king and the others lower ranked, I assume?
While I haven't done for so long a time that I can't really remember how it went, I've played in a few games where the ref has singled out one player as special (required for a prophecy in most cases). It worked fine in the sense that there was no strife among the players caused by it but it did have some game awkwardness:
- In this case, the special PC was required to save the land from some great evil. Which, since all PCs were completely commited to this cause, meant that in-character, it made sense to disproportionately award the special character loot to make him as safe and strong as possible. If he died, all was lost. If the rest of us died, it wasn't quite so serious (unless it then led to his deat of course). You can get that to a lesser extent with a king.
- It was awkward for the referee as he juggled the need to service the situation he had set up versus the need to execute a game that was reasonably equitable to the players. This ranged from the quandary of "if I kill this PC, my entire campaign arc is over" to "if the special PC is so important, it seems the bad guys need to be more focused on bumping this PC off."
